AbstractsEngineering

Agronomic assessment of grazing method of corn residues on cow performance, residue utilization, crop yield, and soil properties

by Daniel William Spring




Institution: University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign
Department:
Year: 2015
Keywords: Cohesive Zone Models; Cohesive Element Method; Interfacial Debonding; Interphases; Filled Elastomers; Dynamic Fracture; Mesh Dependency; Polygonal Finite Elements; Element Splitting; Adaptive Refinement; Pervasive Fragmentation; Coupled Cohesive-Friction
Posted: 02/05/2017
Record ID: 2134937
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/88008


Abstract

Material failure pervades the fields of materials science and engineering; it occurs at various scales and in various contexts. Understanding the mechanisms by which a material fails can lead to advancements in the way we design and build the world around us. For example, in structural engineering, understanding the fracture of concrete and steel can lead to improved structural systems and safer designs; in geological engineering, understanding the fracture of rock can lead to increased efficiency in oil and gas extraction; and in biological engineering, understanding the fracture of bone can lead to improvements in the design of bio-composites and medical implants. In this thesis, we numerically investigate a wide spectrum of failure behavior; in soft and quasi-brittle materials with nonhomogeneous microstructures considering a statistical distribution of material properties. The first topic we investigate considers the influence of interfacial interactions on the macroscopic constitutive response of particle reinforced elastomers. When a particle is embedded into an elastomer, the polymer chains in the elastomer tend to adsorb (or anchor) onto the surface of the particle; creating a region in the vicinity of each particle (often referred to as an interphase) with distinct properties from those in the bulk elastomer. This interphasial region has been known to exist for many decades, but is primarily omitted in computational investigations of such composites. In this thesis, we present an investigation into the influence of interphases on the macroscopic constitutive response of particle filled elastomers undergoing large deformations. In addition, at large deformations, a localized region of failure tends to accumulate around inclusions. To capture this localized region of failure (often referred to as interfacial debonding), we use cohesive zone elements which follow the Park-Paulino-Roesler traction-separation relation. To account for friction, we present a new, coupled cohesive-friction relation and detail its formulation and implementation. In the process of this investigation, we developed a small library of cohesive elements for use with a commercially available finite element analysis software package. Additionally, in this thesis, we present a series of methods for reducing mesh dependency in two-dimensional dynamic cohesive fracture simulations of quasi-brittle materials. In this setting, cracks are only permitted to propagate along element facets, thus a poorly designed discretization of the problem domain can introduce artifacts into the fracture behavior. To reduce mesh induced artifacts, we consider unstructured polygonal finite elements. A randomly-seeded polygonal mesh leads to an isotropic discretization of the problem domain, which does not bias the direction of crack propagation. However, polygonal meshes tend to limit the possible directions a crack may travel at each node, making this discretization a poor candidate for dynamic cohesive fracture simulations. To alleviate this problem, we… Advisors/Committee Members: Paulino, Glaucio H. (advisor), Paulino, Glaucio H. (Committee Chair), Buttlar, William (committee member), Jasiuk, Iwona (committee member), Lopez-Pamies, Oscar (committee member), Elbanna, Ahmed (committee member), Park, Kyoungsoo (committee member).